The Irish: the mother parish's first people

1844 – PRESENT

The Irish are in the town's first Catholic sentence: when Edward Sorin, writing his chronicle in 1855, looked back at the little frame building Mishawaka's Catholics had bought for $600 in 1848, he wrote that it "answered the purpose for the Irish and the Germans, who had meanwhile become much more numerous than they were before." The parish that building housed — erected 10 December 1848 as the Church of the Holy Angels, later St. Joseph's — was from its first decade a shared Irish-German congregation, and the Irish are named in its founding geography: from 1844, before any church stood, Mass was said in the homes of Edward Mulligan, George Smith and Jeremiah Luce, and Mulligan's is the Irish name at the head of the mission's household roll. The parish's whole course — the 1861 fire, the 1893 Gothic church on Mill Street, the long pastorate of the German August Oechtering from 1867 — stands in the religion file; what belongs here is the community fact: Mishawaka's Irish were numerous enough by 1848 to be one of the mother parish's two named peoples, and they built no separate Irish institution in the town that the record reached.

That second half is a searched result, printed whole. No Irish parish, Hibernian division, Irish hall or Irish society seated in Mishawaka stands in the sources reached; the one Irishman the town's church record names in a pulpit is the Irish-born Rev. Joseph Adderly of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, whom his abolitionist congregation pressed in 1863 to preach against slavery as the Methodist and Presbyterian preachers in town were doing — an Irish voice in the record, in an Episcopal rectory. The county's Irish organizations of the later record seat in South Bend, and they are boundary-printed here as South Bend's. The Irish of Mishawaka assimilated through the shared parish rather than beside it; their community history is the mother parish's history, and it is cross-referenced, not retold.

Sources

1. Edward Sorin, Chronicles of Notre Dame du Lac (Toohey translation) — the 1855 passage: the 1848 building, the $600 purchase, "for the Irish and the Germans."
2. Alerding, The Diocese of Fort Wayne, 1857–1907 — the St. Joseph's sketch: Mass in the homes of Edward Mulligan, George Smith and Jeremiah Luce; the parish's course to 1907.
3. Religion file of this record — St. Joseph's erected 10 December 1848; the parish's course whole.
4. Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana Archives, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Mishawaka — the Irish-born Rev. Joseph Adderly and the congregation's 1863 abolition demand.